Sunday, 23 February 2014

Exile and Perpetual Wandering

IN Hannah Arendt's essay, "We Refugees", she explains how after being shunted from one place to another, and after being rendered unable to live the most ordinary of human lives, refugees, in great numbers, end up taking their own lives. At one place she writes,

Perhaps the philosophers are right who teach that suicide is the last and supreme guarantee of human freedom: not being free to create our lives or the world in which we live, we nevertheless are free to throw away life and leave the world.

The three subjects of Kanafani's "Men in the Sun" embody this mindset in both their psychological states and their physical journey. Though they do not outright commit suicide, the journey that they choose to embark on is a suicide mission and the last resort of a people who have nothing left to lose.  Abu Qais quite literally says that he might die but goes anyway because death is preferable to the state of limbo he and his wife live in, on the charity of others, physically in the same space but with no rootedness, with no belonging, and so wanderers even while not moving. Throughout the story the three men believe there will be something better for them at their destination. Abu Qais recalls the dignity of the life he lived in Palestine, hoping for nothing more than a shack and some olive shoots, the others--having no memory of dignified life in a homeland--just hope for something different, and even though they have nothing to compare their current state of despondency to they know that something is lacking and they hope that it will be found in Kuwait. For all three of them, their condition is informed by loss of or lack of homeland, leaving them in a perpetual state of uprootedness and wandering which is shown, in the story, to be worse than death and so these three men choose to for once and for all end this state by either getting to a place of dignity or accepting death in the process. This is exceptionally clear in the case of Abu Qais who quite literally wants to go to Kuwait so that he may have the means to build an actual physical home for his family.

In Arendt's essay, she explains that even when refugees reach a new destination, no matter how much they try they cannot belong, and there is nothing that can end that state of homelessness (except the final end of all that is found in death). Arendt describes a constant unbelonging and unfreedom, refugees being the only prisoners locked out of everywhere wishing that they were locked in somewhere, anywhere. In Kanafani's story we never get to see the three subjects reach a new place and face this crisis. There is no picture of the sense of unbelonging and unfreedom that they would have felt in yet another alien country. All three die on the way there. Perhaps this is Kanafani's way of agreeing with Arendt, that the dignity and hope that is embodied for his three characters in Kuwait doesn't exist for refugees, that the only freedom left for refugees, is the freedom to die.

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